* The Man in the Net, starring Alan Ladd, directed by Michael Curtiz. Read the review that one fan called "a classic example of...uninformed arrogance" and inspired him to suggest I "take up something else to while away your time or attend a junior college film class."

* New York, New York, Martin Scorsese's notorious 1977 musical mash-up of new and old styles, starring De Niro and Minnelli.

Monday, June 20, 2011

MOVIN' RIGHT ALONG

This past weekend, my friend Robert Fortney (who also snapped the above photo) and I took a road trip down to Coos Bay, Oregon, to see the second-ever live performance of Mike Allred's band The Gear. We then hung out at Mike's house and enjoyed that famous Allred hospitality. (So much French Toast!)

Bobby was driving, and our trip was going to be over 3 hours, so I made a 3-hour, 23-minute road trip mix, with an ear towards propulsive rhythms and choosing songs that had some sort of thematic connection to travel, running, the sun, freedom, etc.

52 songs in all. If anyone wants to try to rebuild it themselves, here is the full track listing.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Comic Con fast approaches. This year, hotels and badges sold out at a record speed. Servers crashed just trying to deal with demand.

Once upon a time, this was not so. Whether this is good or bad is a larger debate, but to illustrate how different it once was, I offer you this item from my first ever San Diego Comic Con attendance.

That's a poster for the Marvel/Epic reprint series of Moebius comics. This line was released in 1987, which is when I got the poster. I was 15. I had never read Moebius, but he was well known, everyone was aware of his work. This was a time when Heavy Metal magazine was still sold at convenience stores, and everyone my age had a friend who had an older brother who read Heavy Metal--and usually did so inside a van with a Frank Frazetta painting on the side.

I didn't go to the show planning to meet Moebius. My list of must-sees were the Pander Bros., Dave Stevens, Art Adams, Matt Wagner, and the like. All of which I had hunted down, and so at some point, I started wandering the aisles seeking what was there to find. Down one random aisle, flanked by booksellers and T-shirt displays, Moebius sat all by himself. I don't know if he was with Marvel or a book dealer or just had his own table, but there was this white-haired man with glasses just sitting there, no line, no one in front of him, nothing. I looked at his stuff, saw the free posters, asked to get one signed.

He obliged.

Such promotional techniques worked, in so much as I bought the first Epic volume. I didn't much care for it, so never bought the rest. But that's just the part I tell at parties to shock people.

The memory baffles me to this day. How had the most famous international artist in our industry get hidden away down a side corridor in the convention hall, like a point on a scavenger hunt. "Find Moebius, win a prize!" When was the last time he even set foot through the doors of the San Diego Convention Center? And when he did...did anyone notice?

By the way, I didn't smudge the signature, he did. See the spotting around the "to" and at the end of my name? As you can see, the poster folded multiple times, it was not rolled. Moebius opened the first flap, signed the poster with his silver pen, and immediately flopped it closed again, not even waiting for it to dry. Maybe he sensed I was wasting his time and was punishing me, I have no idea. I remember grabbing the artifact in a panic and opening it back up again to minimize damage. You'd think a cartoonist would know how ink and paint worked!

Tr!ckster plans are starting to come to fruition. One of the big things the team is putting together is workshops and Symposia so that attendees can get some professional information a little more valuable than the latest movie trailer or a slide show of comics covers that will be available on the internet five minutes later.

SYMPOSIUM 5:Saturday, 7/23/11, 1:00PM to 3:00 PMBUILDING A CREATOR-OWNED CREATIVE TEAMFeaturing storytellers MIKE ALLRED, LARRY MARDER, GREG RUCKA, JAMIE S. RICH, and more TBAWriting a story is hard enough, but finding the visual pairing to help express the story to its fullest can be pivotal in crafting your work. The right combination of exposition and dialogue with the perfect set of sequential images make for excellent, memorable storytelling in comics and children’s books. Join in with acclaimed writers and the artists they’ve worked with as they explore how the creative team, and the creative process, come to fruition.

PERFECT FOR: writers and artists hoping to make comics as a team.

This is, obviously, a topic I know more than a little something about.

I'm considering also making a minicomic to sell at conventions collecting the three short stories Joëlle Jones and I did for Popgun. Is there interest in such a thing? Would people buy it? I'm serious with this question. It's a lot of money to pull together, so I toss this out there just to see if anyone responds.

Current Soundtrack: Kaiser Chiefs, The Future is Medieval -- the new record, build it yourself at their website

Just goes to show, it’s always bad when you don’t take your own advice.

For a while now, whenever the idea of me trying to get work from the big superhero publishers has been mentioned, my reason for not trying very hard to do it has always been, “I don’t want to be the guy who spends months working on a Blue Beetle proposal, only to find out they’re going to kill him.” A joke I must have come up with around the time of 52.

Well, no joke, I ignored that thinking and decided to work on some proposals earlier this year. Not out of any expectation that I’d get the specific books greenlit, but that I could create showpieces for myself and maybe parlay that into other work. To play it safe, however, I decided not to get obscure with my character choices but instead to monkey with some mid-level perennials that weren’t likely to go anywhere. That’s always the hardest thing, you see, and the first question any editor will ask you: what characters do you want to work on? It drives me nuts. I lean toward a joke from an old pre-fame Johnny Depp movie called Private Resort. Johnny claims to be a doctor, pretty girl asks Johnny, “What kind of a doctor are you?” Suave eyes, suave reply: “What kind do you need?”

Tell me what you're looking for, I will tell you if I can delivery, but let's not play a guessing game.

In doing this, I honestly thought what would likely happen was that, since I was pitching with Joëlle, that she’d get a gig out of these efforts (because how could she not?) and I’d have some plots I could recycle elsewhere. Because between the two of us, I know which one I’d hire.

Well, I suppose DC rebooting their entire line is the reason I can tell myself for why no one ever returned any of my e-mails. Even mid-level perennials have been unplugged and plugged back in again. Too bad. Now you’re even less likely to see the already unlikely Power Girl/Supergirl team-up by myself and Joëlle Jones.

This isn’t a pity party, nor am I looking for positive reinforcement or showings of support. Just sharing mildly interesting anecdotes from my freelance life.

By the way, it doesn’t always work even when you try to fulfill a specific need. For a while, I had the ear of an editor who had a particular property I was interested in, and I kept looking for ways to pitch fill-ins or spin-offs, stuff the guy might actually have a use for. Every time I thought I had a great idea, I’d send it in. He tended to agree that it was good stuff...only I was working with a status quo that was about to change. You know, they were about to (metaphorically) kill Blue Beetled. Always a step or two behind.

My confession...

Author of prose novels and comic books like Cut My Hair, It Girl & the Atomics, You Have Killed Me, and 12 Reasons Why I Love Her. Jamie's most recent novel is the serialized book Bobby Pins and Mary Janes, and his most recent graphic novels are the sci-fi romance A Boy and a Girl with Natalie Nourigat; Madame Frankenstein with Megan Levens; and the weird crime comic Archer Coe & the Thousand Natural Shocks with Dan Christensen. He also co-created Lady Killer with Joëlle Jones.